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I can imagine a time when this practice becomes so common that spambots start mass-applying, and then employers need to use a CAPTCHA to ensure that only humans are using their API.

CAPTCHAs on an API. Never thought I'd see the day...



More useful: We'll put our qualifications up using JSON at our own websites and they will crawl them with a bot.


> CAPTCHAs on an API. Never thought I'd see the day...

You could argue that this is essentially accomplished through API keys/secrets and rate limiting.


Not on public APIs but I doubt we'll 'see the day' in any case.


It's already here. Think of Google search as a public API. They put captchas up if they think you're a spammer.


Actually, I specced this out for Delicious around 2007. I wanted to have the API be able to reply with "break this CAPTCHA/challenge/etc to continue" before actually applying the write/read/etc. (Delicious was very aggressively spammed.)




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